


our hometown’s in the dark

by jonsrightrib (sotakeabitofcalpol)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (canonical), Angst, Disordered Eating, Gen, Hurt/ How The Fuck Do I Comfort?, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, basically a fic based on that horrible feeling when you try to help your friends but make it worse, definite spoilers from MAG 125 onward, implied depression, or as I like to call it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23373868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sotakeabitofcalpol/pseuds/jonsrightrib
Summary: She tries. She really does. But she can’t drag them back into the light.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 41





	our hometown’s in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> Would like to disclaimer: One, lots of references to starvation and not eating on top of me making canon just a bit more angsty. Two, Basira is not unsympathetic in this, she just doesn’t know how to help. She tries, but fucks it up, like anyone in her place could. Don’t hate her/ me

When she’d joined the Archives, it had felt full, full of violent emotions and paranoia and people. Sure, everything was going to shit, but they were fighting it, together.

It just feels hollow now, barely inhabited by hollow people even though they don’t leave. All the life has gone.

She misses it.

* * *

She remembers, before the Buried, Daisy had always worn an oversized bomber; a gift from a friend, she'd said. She'd worn it all year round, all her off-duty hours. There were probably innumerable bloodstains washed out that faded thing, coffee and ink, stained with memories and fear alike. She'd even been wearing when they went down to Brighton, pockets stuffed full of weapons and explosives.

She'd watched Daisy burn it after she came out of the coffin. It hadn't caught, clogged with mud, so she'd doused it in gasoline and walked off, eyes glinting in the firelight.

So of course, the natural assumption when Daisy'd started wearing a different jacket was that it was simply how she liked them. It certainly suited her, accentuating her slightness. She knows it's not healthy, that that slightness is starvation, but she can blame beauty standards for that. She tries not to admire that slightness, especially when she passes out and gives herself another patch of bruises on too-thin skin.

She really manages to stop admiring it when she grabs the new jacket off the back of Jon's chair ~~since when did they get on~~ and notices that the jacket Daisy's drowning in is a small.

* * *

It's fine when Jon's jacket is a small, though. He's always been tiny, a scrap of bones so very slightly held together by wrecked and scarred skin. He'd been dwarfed by the hospital bed, is dwarfed by his desk chair and the beat-up sofa in the break room he's crashed on since. Scrawny child, dosed with trauma and paranoia, grown into barely-there adult.

She'd almost believe it was just that he isn't feeding his god that's given him cracked lips and even deeper hollows. That's definitely part of it, but she's seen him eat and Feed, watched him genuinely enjoy the few office takeaways they've shared, so it's fair to say he probably needs both.

Now he does neither. This weird slow starvation doesn't suit him like it almost suits Daisy; he used to be present in a room. She used to find him intimidating, with those sharp eyes, but they're dull and turned down to the ground now. He's managing to be a background character in something that's been written to be his story.

* * *

Martin's not even in the story, written himself out of it. As he's faded, ginger hair growing longer and white, freckles disappearing, so too has the ink his story was written in, blending him into the pages, unreadable.

His softness has faded too. She'd found it slightly pitiful, that softness in a hard world, but he feels wrong with it stripped away. Even the smudges of purple under his eyes aren't soft, nor are they even colourful, they're just watercolour bruises after a thunderstorm.

* * *

Melanie's got that same washed away feel, but that's really her fault. As the hole they'd pulled the bullet from had bled, so had the energy she'd been crackling with, forcing teeth bared and hackles up. Everything she does now is lacklustre, except being angry at Jon, but she's apparently been doing that since before she took a bullet to the leg. She's just lashing out for the sake of it now; wounded predator snarling at wounded prey. It doesn't help either of them. Besides, Daisy's the predator. Melanie's just bitter.

Melanie's also not bothering to do anything. She's...one of the ghosts she'd hunted, an echo. All the anger and no purpose. She's going that way too.

* * *

She drags them all into a pub for a proper meal, one lunchtime. They look no better in the light, away from the dim fluorescents in the basement. Empty, all of them, in a way that makes her think of hand puppets; waiting to be used. That's their purpose, whether they fight it or not.

Daisy and Jon make no effort to pretend to eat. She can tell they need it, Daisy's still mostly bone from the coffin, Jon not far behind. They're both just angles and hollows, cheekbones and dark eye bags. She wishes she didn't know how little both of them slept.

Martin preoccupies himself shuffling the food around his plate, chewing the bits he does eat as though they're sawdust. All the colour is bleaching out of him, even in the warm lights of the pub. She suspects Jon would be shooting worries glances if he weren't so tired.

Melanie at least seems to stomach some of the pie. She seems present, here in the moment, in better spirits than the rest. Maybe there's hope for her.

A week later, she's taken out of the Institute by ambulance.

* * *

After Melanie leaves, she mostly gives up trying to make anyone to eat. It's hard enough to find it in herself, let alone in them.

One time, after snapping when Daisy collapses for the third time that day, she insists on her eating something, which ends up being a pot noodle from the back of the cupboard. It's got Tim's handwriting on it, claiming it as his, and telling Jon to keep his hands off. She doesn't feel particularly guilty about using it; he's dead, and he was an asshole before that. She never managed to reconcile the Tim that Jon's mumbled about in his worse moments to the one she knew, so she doesn't feel bad about throwing the post-it out either.

Daisy eats it, painfully slowly. She doesn't stick around for fear of losing her patience.

She doesn't, as a consequence, hear Daisy throwing it back up not twenty minutes later, nor the tears of frustration that come with it. She does learn her lesson, though, when Jon screams at her for it later, the only time he's gotten physically angry at her in a long time, maybe ever.

She does feel guilty for that.

* * *

After that, she just doesn't. That uncharacteristic guilt has coiled in her gut, pressing in deeper every time she tries to be angry or to help. She's fucked up all the other times, and if finding the energy to look out for herself was difficult before she'd hurt Daisy, there was none of it now. She's...tired. Probably. She doesn't know. She hates not knowing.

She doesn't have a fucking manual for this. She doesn't know how to help without hurting them.

The Eye, if it had chosen her, chose her because she's always been one to seek knowledge, to find answers. To watch everything play out. It's some perverse irony that now she has to watch them fall apart. She has to watch.

She really wants to look away.

**Author's Note:**

> Not my finest work, but it’s self-loathing projection onto fictional character hours.
> 
> For reference I do love Basira. We don’t always know what to do, and she’s very much forced into a position of being the only real person who could help, without any of the knowledge required to do good.
> 
> All Basira’s mistakes are versions of my own.


End file.
